For an extreme bencher like myself, the Athlon II X4 630 is never going to set world records; but for what it lacked in performance, it made up for in fun. Not having to fight coldbugs (a temperature where components cease working), made for a most enjoyable change, while still giving plenty of scope to overclock. As you could see from the CPU-Z screenshot, we almost achieved a 100% overclock.

Unfortunately it was not without its own unique quirks. For the life of me this setup simply refuses to pass 400HTT. At this time I believe it to be a board limitation or the memory controller on the chip (the system had great difficulty running above 1600MHz on the memory as the CPU clock speeds increased), or perhaps a combination of both. I have e-mailed ASUS to try to resolve this problem and I will update my results if possible.

I have also taken the opportunity to run the full spread of competition benchmarks utilizing different operating systems and tweaks. Check out the forums shortly to see these results posted and to see how they stack up against the competition.

If you were wondering why anyone would go to such lengths, please remember that not so many years ago, if you said you watercooled your processor people looked at you like you were from another planet. There are also positive spinoffs for mainstream users as manufacturers have to produce more robust and versatile components to meet our needs.

Put quite simply, if we (extreme overclockers) can't kill it, no-one can, and hopefully the vendors will have fewer RMA's and the mainstream users less hardware failures.

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